South Africa has always had a special relationship with citrus, especially during rugby seasons, when naartjies and oranges are still occasionally used at Loftus as fan missiles.
More importantly, citrus is a major national success story, standing alongside mining and automotive as one of the country’s key strategic value generators. It earned R44.9bn last year, when South Africa also became the world’s largest citrus exporter.
The country’s economy is increasingly agricentric, though it is rarely reflected as such in media coverage or policy priorities. Agriculture underpins food security, regionally and at home, while driving growth and employment. It generated R341m a day in foreign exchange in 2025, surpassing the combined daily earnings of gold and platinum mining. Citrus alone employs 140,000 South Africans and is attracting rising foreign investment.
Global players rank South Africa among the world’s most competitive agricultural producers, rivalled only by agribehemoths such as Argentina, Brazil and the US. And South African citrus has emerged as playing a pivotal part in global investment strategies; companies like Twente Partners, headquartered in Barcelona, now base more production here than anywhere else.
To fully appreciate the significance of this shift, it’s important to remember where the country came from. In the 1990s South Africa pivoted from a centrally controlled system — the sector having been dominated by Outspan and the Citrus Board — to a free market, in contrast with heavily subsidised competitors.
Despite political complexity regarding agritransformation, letting the sector run its own course has proved successful. Clusters of agriactivity have been built into a robust, self-reinforcing ecosystem. And, perhaps surprisingly, producers, traders and ancillary businesses have been sharpened, not defeated, by failing infrastructure.
The 2025 season captured the upside: export volumes were strong, and diverse destination markets mitigated the threat — possibly existential, possibly not — of US President Donald Trump’s tariff wars. The US remains important, but so are the EU, the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, with new openings in China and Asia.
The Citrus Growers Association (CGA) and the Sundays River Citrus Company (SRCC) typify operations built on innovation, agriscience and sustainability. The CGA represents more than 1,400 growers, most certified in terms of the Sustainability Initiative of South Africa (Siza). With 824 active citrus businesses registered with Siza across 3,617 production sites, South Africa boasts genuine scale.
Equally, the SRCC’s industrial energy efficiency project delivered a 37% saving against its targets by 2013, before load-shedding became routine. It has run an irrigation scheme in a water-stressed region since 1987 and a transformation programme dating back nearly two decades.
Reality check
While citrus is obviously South Africa’s star export performer, other fresh produce is gaining strength, and last year we became the first country to sign a deal with China covering five stone fruit lines simultaneously. The first shipment, a consignment of plums, left a Franschhoek packhouse in early 2026. Projections put the 2025/2026 season at about R28m, rising to R54m in 2026/2027.
The Chinese market, the government hopes, could unlock R400m in stone fruit export value over five years, doubling within a decade. By 2032/2033, it hopes China-bound exports will account for 5% of the total volume.
Producers such as Dutoit Group, Zonnehaven and Doornkraal Agri are already well positioned.
But growers are creating opportunities themselves too: new cherry varietals have widened the seasonal production window, with cherry farming now viable in once impossibly warm areas such as Mpumalanga. Volumes have soared, and South Africa has submitted a draft protocol to China’s customs authority. Climate change, perhaps, is opening doors as well as closing others.
There is, of course, a need for a reality check. Agriculture is wildly variable because of weather, price swings, failing infrastructure and geopolitical shocks. The war in Iran has disrupted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, while a super El Niño severely limits passage through the Panama Canal. Such events raise costs and close trade routes. Citrus in 2025 was strong, but 2026 is considerably tougher and the market is bracing for contracting returns.
If we want to keep the momentum going, we need to pay attention to the supporting pillars, including fixing agrispecific infrastructure, such as the fresh produce markets and ports — Cape Town’s was recently ranked worst in the world.
But we must also create policy certainty that encourages investment, resolve the issue of the distribution of government-owned land to the historically disadvantaged and ensure that new farmers can secure land ownership and build balance sheets that allow them to raise capital.
It is also true that the free-market approach has resulted in fragmentation and fatigue, with some parties being frustrated because of past failures to put essential guardrails in place. More talk shops and dialogues are unlikely to move the needle in a landscape of representative bodies with sharply different mandates, major producers fighting to stay on course and small farmers absorbing the same obstacles without having the scale to cope.
Levers exist for both the government and industry. The question is whether the sector can co-ordinate enough to settle on an action list and act on it fast. Still, the progress we’ve seen with citrus deserves to be acknowledged — it is proof that South African producers can outcompete the world’s subsidised giants fair and square, without the need for overripe missiles from Loftus.
White is a professor and head of the Porter Institute Africa Hub at the Gordon Institute of Business Science. Miller is a strategy and communications consultant in Southern African agriculture
